6 Japanese War Crimes during World War II Allied command who were unaware the ships carried their own troops. Ten percent of these POWs—3,526, to be exact—died before the war ended they drowned at sea, starved, or were beaten to death while being exploited by Japanese companies.40 The treatment of POWs by the Japanese soldiers was extreme and surpris- ing to many, because Japan was considered to have set an example of how to treat POWs, especially during the first conflicts of the 20th century such as the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the First World War (1914–1918).41 Even harsher, however, was the treatment of Asian civilians who were also regularly exploited by Japanese troops. Estimations list up to half a million Southeast Asian people being mobilized for Japanese construction projects, due to which many of them died a horrible death amidst the whips and insults of the soldiers who supervised and mistreated them in the name of the emperor.42 To name another example, Chinese laborers were also forced to work in Japan nearly a quarter of them died by the end of the war.43 Japanese officials, however, claim that these people were recruits who had voluntarily decided to serve in Japan. The same argument was used in addressing the claims of former sex slaves, the so-called “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution by the Japanese army. Although the list of war crimes could be continued here, the issue of comfort women shall be discussed briefly.44 American scholar Ustinia Dolgopol was right when she emphasized that “[t]he history of the comfort women is the story of voices being denied and suppressed,”45 as for years nobody would follow the leads that would have demanded attention on the issue. When the first survivors testified, the Japa nese government ignored the truth of their accounts. While the Japanese Embassy in South Korea has “acknowledged the comfort women issue and extended official apologies on many important occasions,” the survivors themselves “reject such statements on the grounds that these gestures were short in both legitimacy and reparations.”46 The matter of a formal Japanese apology to former “comfort women” (ianfu) is a “hot-button issue in the Far East,”47 regularly causing tension between China and Korea on one side and Japan on the other. The problem involves not only the issue of a formal apol- ogy, but is also affected by memory policies and nationalism within the three countries involved. When former comfort women testified before the U.S. Congress in 1996 demanding that the American government put pressure on Japan to acknowledge the Japanese army’s responsibility in forcing young Korean and Chinese women into prostitution, the issue became global and has remained so ever since.48 Of course, the fact that up to 200,000 women were forced to be prostitutes—being sexually abused, beaten, and even killed by Japanese soldiers—is an issue that causes tension, especially because Japan tends to neglect the matter without accepting guilt about its military plans to establish the comfort system since the early 1930s. Women and girls were